Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/129

claims to the mastery of the world. The Galileo of our day will not retract what he knows to be the truth, on bended knee.

You will permit me, in the performance of my task, to descend to the smallest details, and to be habitually technical; and Science, gentlemen, only attains its sacred object, the discovery of truth, on condition of being special and rigorous. Everyone is not intended to be a chemist, physician, philologist; to shut himself up in his laboratory, to follow up for years an experiment, or a calculation; everyone, however, participates in the great philosophical results of chemistry, medicine, and philology. To present these results, divested of the processes which have served to discover them, is a useful thing which Science should not forbid. But such is not the mission of the College of France: all the most special and most minute processes of Science should be here laid bare. Laborious demonstrations, patient analysis, excluding it is true no general development, no legitimate digres-